Considering legal mechanism design from a complexity perspective

(P0-09) Important CANS Characteristics

Before addressing the What is a CANS? question we first give an overview of important characteristics often mentioned as building blocks for the CANS concept: diverse agents with behavioral parameters; dynamics; emergence; replication; metabolism; survival; selection; recursion, or scale free phenomena; bottom-up and top-down causation; network structures, multi-level feedback loops; self-organization; critical transitions. These characteristics form and make the CANS concept into a family concept, and make real-life complex adaptive networked systems ready for complexity theory.

For who is interested in the law, we mention several jurisdictions that have these characteristics. The networked collections of individuals and institutions that contribute to the formation of the EU and feel pressures to comply with the EU jurisdiction may be an adequate example. As a matter of fact, we think that the characteristics mentioned are equally applicable to the multilevel jurisdictions of, for instance, and perhaps bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble, `the USA,’ `the former USSR,’ `China,’ South Africa,’ `the Commonwealth’ and `the IS.’